The Natural Resources of Dutchess County in the Past ... Program in Environmental Studies ... elected to the National Academy of Arts and ... The Natural Resources of Dutchess County

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The Natural Resources of Dutchess County in the Past, Present and Future*

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Harvey K. Flad, Vassar College1

Introduction

In this essay, I would like to present a broad view of the history of environmental and land use

planning in Dutchess County – one that encompasses both the humanities and the social sciences as

well as the natural sciences in order to understand the various approaches that have been used to

observe, describe, interpret, analyze, understand, and manage our county‟s natural resources. This

seems to me to be a fitting approach since we are here, at Vassar College, which, through its

Multidisciplinary Program in Environmental Studies (this past weekend‟s 10th Anniversary) attempts

to integrate these often-diverse fields of knowledge into something of a coherent whole when

examining human-environment relationships. I hope to suggest that in most of these approaches an

initial “inventory” acts as a foundation for the effort; it may simply be one of curiosity or it may be as

focused as a scientific examination, but it will form the empirical base for later contemplation, policies

or planning.

Ethical Approaches to Conservation

In A Sand County Almanac (1949, OUP 1966), the great conservationist Aldo Leopold (1887-1948)

posits a “Land Ethic” as a philosophical basis for land stewardship. In creating policies for

appropriate use of the land as natural resource, he argued, “[Q]uit thinking about decent land use as

solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically

right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the

integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Furthermore, “We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or

otherwise have faith in.”

1 Harvey K. Flad is Emeritus Professor of Geography at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. This talk was originally presented by Dr. Flad as the keynote address for the Conference on the Natural Resource Inventory of Dutchess County, NY at Vassar College on November 6, 2010.

The Natural Resources of Dutchess County in the Past, Present and Future

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Inventories – both Natural Resource Inventories (NRI‟s) and Cultural Resource Inventories (CRI‟s) -

can help us “see, feel and understand” these resources, and hopefully even “love or otherwise have

faith in” our local landscapes, and thereby construct ethical land use policies. As Leopold observed,

“A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the

face of the land.” The Dutchess County landscape is a text upon which we, and generations before

us, have written our signatures. Inventories, such as NRI‟s and CRI‟s, organize the elements of the

landscape; they are the words, so-to-speak of the text, and help us discern how well its “integrity,

stability, and beauty” has been maintained.

Over the last 300 years, the mid-Hudson and Dutchess County landscape has been perceived and

shaped according to a number of different, and often, contrasting, approaches. Thirty years ago, D.W.

Meinig, Maxwell Research Professor of Geography Emeritus at Syracuse University (who was recently

elected to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences), offered ten separate categories for defining

how one may perceive a landscape: for example, certain perspectives, such as “landscape as wealth,”

which is a utilitarian view of land as an economic resource, often contrast with landscape as “nature”

or “habitat” or “system” which consider landscape elements, that is, its natural resources, as

composing a bioregion apart from human influence. Natural scientists often study the individual

natural resources, or landscape elements, through such lenses, while humanists and social scientists

lean towards Meinig‟s categories of understanding the composition of a landscape as “ideology,”

“history,” “place,” or “aesthetic.”

Today, I would like to briefly examine these perspectives with relation to the many ways in which

both the natural and cultural resources that compose the Dutchess County landscape have been

perceived, described, used, abused, promoted and planned.

Natural History – Early Narratives

Many of the earliest descriptions of the Hudson Valley were traveler‟s narratives. Within the frame of

natural history writing, many were simply lists and descriptions of “factual” observations, often of

“curiosities,” or of natural resources according to potential economic value, such as forests, fauna,

flora, soil fertility or minerals, such as iron ore in the Taconic Hills and eastern Dutchess County or

clays for brick making along the Hudson River‟s banks. Some of these 18th and early 19th century

“inventories” attempted to place their observations into one or another of the emerging natural


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sciences, such as geology or botany, with attempts at identifying species diversity or geological

formations. They were, at least among the best of them, holistic in their review of the elements that

composed the natural world. Certainly, some tended towards a teleological, that is, a Divinely-

centered, perspective of an organized, organic world. But, on the whole, they gathered thousands of

“factual observations” which would – in the 19th century – begin to become part of a coherent system,

something that we could eventually call “ecology.”

Meanwhile, local settlers expressed occasional concern at the growing overuse of the former natural

resource bounty. For example, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, author of the significant eighteenth-

century work Letters from an American Farmer (1782) where he asked rhetorically, “What, then, is this

new American?” and whose estate in Orange County was in the Hudson Valley bioregion, observed

the relationship between deforestation and the drying up of the land. An interest in environmental

conservation would develop into the nineteenth century. For example, in 1864, George Perkins Marsh

published the first major treatise on conservation in America, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as

Modified by Human Action, in which he posited “Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to

him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste.” Marsh‟s call for

stewardship of the land‟s resources would lead to contrasting views of the domestication of the

landscape, one where the role of man became the ecological dominant to shape, or “modify,” the

landscape.

The study of Nature (always with a capital “N”) in the nineteenth-century was both scientific and

practical, while also considered a moral undertaking. Although its rather eclectic collections of facts,

objects and processes would eventually lead to the concept of the bioregion, such studies became

subsumed by the rise of natural science. Yet, it is to the many longitudinal base-line collections that

current Natural Resource Inventories refer. For example, the weather and ecological data that one of

the last of the great “natural historians,” Daniel Smiley, collected at the Mohonk Mountain House and

on the Mohonk Preserve here in the mid-Hudson bioregion is extraordinarily important for current

research on climate change. Paul Huth carries on this tradition.

The Nineteenth-Century Landscape Aesthetic

In the 19th century, a concern for the human despoliation of the landscape engaged those who viewed

landscape through a variety of lenses; for those who recognized a utilitarian perspective of the land‟s


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natural resources, deforestation and the loss of soil fertility argued for modernizing agricultural

practices, such as the use of guano to fertilize depleted fields, while artists, essayists and gardeners

portrayed the changing scene in ideological terms; some, positively as “improvements” and

“progress,” while others deplored the loss of the natural environment.

Thomas Cole (1801-1848), considered the founder of the Hudson River School of Art, was also an

essayist and an early advocate of conservation. In his “Essay on American Scenery” (1836), Cole not

only presented the natural elements that are essential for a landscape painting (such as forests,

waterfalls, and sky) and the emotions they symbolized, but also argued that the dialectic between the

American wilderness and the cultivated landscape was being challenged by “improvements” such that

“the sublimity of the wilderness should pass away.” He lamented that the “ravages of the axe are daily

increasing – the most noble scenes are made desolate, and oftentimes with a wantonness and

barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation.” Furthermore, he offered one of the earliest

arguments for conservation, where “spots, now rife with beauty” should be preserved for future

generations: “The way-side is becoming shadeless, and another generation will behold spots, now rife

with beauty, desecrated by what is called improvement; which, as yet, generally destroys Nature‟s

beauty without substituting that of Art.” He admonished his readers, who were members of the

emerging middle class, to develop a conservation ethic: “It would be well to cultivate the oasis that yet

remains to us, and thus preserve the germs of a future and a purer system.”

Landscape elements noted in Cole‟s essay were painted by fellow artists of the Hudson River School

in the manner of the 19th century landscape aesthetic of the sublime, picturesque or the beautiful.

Artists sought the sublime in the awe-inspiring power of waterfalls or the mystery of the dark and

deep wilderness. Pastoral or bucolic scenes were picturesque, while other more domesticated scenes

often beautiful.

The Hudson River Valley, with its Catskill Mountain wilderness, sky lakes and conglomerate sheer

cliffs of the Shawangunk Mountains, and the farmlands and villages of Dutchess County inspired

other artists, poets and essayists in early conservation efforts. The artist Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)

memorialized Cole along with the poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) upon Cole‟s

death in 1848 in his painting “Kindred Spirits” with both standing in a forest setting with Kaaterskill

Falls in the background. And in this painting, as in his “Where the Streamlet sings in Rural Joy” (ca.


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1850), Durand has carefully depicted the rocks, trees, and lichen, all drawn with felicitous concern for

detail as he and others studied their geology and botany to portray a truthful telling of the elements of

Nature (Figure 1). Note also how Durand‟s title resonates with Bryant‟s Romantic-era poetry. In this

visual text, one can see both humanistic and scientific depictions of the aesthetic landscape.

Figure 1: Asher B. Durand. Where the Streamlet Sings in Rural Joy. 2

2 Oil on canvas, 24 1/8" x 18 1/4". The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, Gift

of Matthew Vassar, 1864.1.26.


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In 1847, one year before Cole‟s death, Durand traveled through Dutchess County on a visit to the

Stone Church, a natural rock cavern in the shape of a Gothic arch seventy feet high and fourteen feet

wide. (From early on, then, we might argue that the Stone Church has been both a natural and a

cultural resource.) From his 1847 visit Durand painted “Dover Plains, Dutchess County, New York”

(1848, Figure 2). It is a rather bucolic view of farms, fields and the Fishkill Hills in the background.

It is in the picturesque manner, with three visitors viewing the scene from a prospect on the lower left

and cows contentedly in the mid-ground. On the lower right hand side is a small drumlin, which, a

century-and-a-half later, has been removed for its gravel to pave roads. The painting is one of

Durand‟s most interesting as it depicts a domesticated landscape of harmony between man and nature

in which, according to Meinig‟s “landscape as artifact,” “every landscape is… a blend of man and

nature.”

Figure 2: Asher B. Durand, Dover Plains, Dutchess County, New York.3

3 Oil on canvas, 42 1/2” x 60 1/2”. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Gift of Thomas M. Evans and museum purchase through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program, 1978, 126.


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Dutchess County, and the rest of the Hudson Valley, were indeed becoming domesticated during the

1840s, with many of the large river estates hiring European gardeners to beautify their grounds.

Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1852), horticulturist with a nursery in Newburgh, became the

“Arbiter of Taste” in landscape gardening throughout America during the heady days of

industrialization and the move of many middle class out of the smoky polluted cities to the

countryside. In his Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America

(1841), he laid the groundwork (so to speak) of landscape architecture and planning in America. In his

other books, editorship of The Horticulturist monthly journal, and personal visits to local properties, he

was instrumental in forming a landscape aesthetic that sought a harmony between the picturesque, with

its ragged asymmetries of the wild, and with the beautiful and its rounded, formal and symmetrical

elements.

A number of properties in Dutchess County landscaped their grounds with both picturesque and

beautiful elements including groves of native trees, stream gorges, and vistas of the Hudson River or

of forested hills and mountains. Two in particular remain as examples of Downing‟s influence today:

Montgomery Place in Rhinebeck and Springside in Poughkeepsie. The latter was Matthew Vassar‟s

summer estate. Downing worked with his partner Calvert Vaux to plan and develop the Springside

property from 1850-52. Upon Downing‟s tragic death by drowning during a steamboat fire on the

Hudson River in 1852, Vassar commissioned four paintings by Henry Gritten of the site, which, along

with Downing and Vaux‟s signed drawings in the Vassar archive, an engraving in a contemporary

copy of The Horticulturist, and the engravings in Benson Lossing‟s biography of Matthew Vassar

(1867), constitute the only extant documented materials of Downing‟s work. The site is listed as a

National Historic Landmark and the landscape is being restored through the efforts of volunteers led

by John Mylod and Virginia Hancock.

After Downing‟s death, Vaux would go to New York City to collaborate with Fredrick Law Olmsted

to design Central Park, and thereby establish landscape architecture as a major design force to bring

Nature into urban America. Although the aesthetic tradition in depicting natural resources as

elements of Nature persisted throughout the 19th century, natural scientists offered new and

competing ways of understanding and managing the natural world.


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Natural Science in Dutchess County

Ante-bellum scientific surveys of Dutchess County created controversy in Natural Science. Ebenezer

Emmons, a student of Amos Eaton, studied the geology of the Taconic Hills and declared a separate

system from the European Silurian and Ordovician, setting up a major controversy within the

emerging field of geology, which was only then determining its geologic time-table of rock facies. The

study of both the Taconics and the Fishkill segment of the Highlands continued throughout the mid-

and late 19th century to determine both their composition, of gneiss, limestone, and shale, and their

origins. The Poughkeepsie newspapers in the 1840s published articles, prior to Agassiz‟s trip to New

York State to generate glacial theory, which attempted to understand the processes of landscape

change. In the 1860s, Vassar geology (and Natural History) professors William B. Dwight and

George Shattuck discovered fossils in the Taconic limestone; they also described the drumlins in

Poughkeepsie and the ponds in Pine Plains left behind by the glaciers of the last Quaternary retraction

that had left Long Island as its terminal moraine. Their research of the county‟s geology,

geomorphology and topography was significant in the evolution of the earth sciences. Both also

added local specimens to Vassar‟s Natural History Museum that had been established at the opening

of the college after Matthew Vassar purchased, in 1862, the first “cabinet” of minerals and other

natural objects sold by Henry Ward of Rochester, New York.

These early geologic surveys would continue into the early and mid-twentieth century with local

studies by Thomas Hills and A. Scott Warthin. In 1924, Hills created relief maps of the Poughkeepsie

and Clove quadrangles for the geology museum, while both he and Warthin gathered many specimens

of local rocks and fossils for students to examine. Scott‟s local geologic studies identified the tectonic

forces that created the “Dutchess Melange” with its location on the edge of the Hudson River under

the Mid-Hudson Bridge. He was also involved in hydrologic studies in the county, especially of the

Wappinger Creek. Discussions with faculty from biology and zoology led to Scott and professor of

botany Edith Roberts to found a Conservation Division in the Vassar curriculum in 1941. Warthin

noted in his 1960 report that flooding forecasts by Conservation students “saved many lives” during

the 1955 floods in Dutchess County. Warthin‟s scientific work on the natural resources of the county

eventually led to him becoming a founding board member of the Hudson River Environmental

Society and Pattern for Progress, a regional planning organization, of which more later.


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In the 1950s, John H. Johnsen continued the study of Dutchess County geology, particularly its

limestone and shale quarries and sand and gravel resources. In 1966, he co-authored with John

Gerard Broughton and James F. Davis the publication Geology and Mineral Resources of the Hudson Valley.

It was one of the major reports, along with its companion Biological Resources, that were commissioned

by Governor Rockefeller‟s Hudson River Valley Commission, to enable their regional planning

efforts, of which, also, more to follow. Geologist Roy Budnik continues Johnny Johnsen‟s work in

the county‟s sand and gravel quarries.

During the 1930s, Edith Adelaide Roberts, professor of plant science, studied and mapped the biota

of the entire county. Together with historian Helen Wilkinson Reynolds, they collaborated on The

Role of Plant Life in the History of Dutchess County (1938), a volume that indicated 29 plant associations of

five groupings related to the locations where they were most likely to be found: open field; bog forest;

aquatic plant; ravine; and floating mat. Along with tables on the plant species and maps of their

locations throughout the county by Roberts, Reynolds complemented the study with cultural history;

for example, where the sites of mills would have been constructed in the 17th and 18th century and the

different field histories for what would be milled, such as timber or grains. Both argued for the

planting of native plants rather than exotics in parks and more humanized landscapes, as A. J.

Downing had espoused almost a century earlier, and the need, therefore, of a natural science base for

regional and local planning. Roberts also developed a plant laboratory at Vassar College of all the

native species, beginning in 1920. With Roberts‟ plans in hand, Professor of Biology Margaret

Ronsheim is currently studying aspects of plant succession at this site and the prospects for

restoration.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a farmer and conservationist as well as Dutchess County‟s most

significant national and international political figure. In his first term in Albany in 1911-12 as a state

senator representing Dutchess County, he was selected as Chairman of the Forest, Fish and Game

Committee, and in his second term, he chaired the Agricultural Committee. He was an ardent

supporter of open-space management and forestry on his estate in Hyde Park. In 1911, Roosevelt

had his farm crew clear over-grown farmland at Springwood and the following year planted thousands

of white pine, red pine, Scotch pine, and Norway spruce seedlings that he got from the New York

State Conservation Commission. He ordered and planted close to one-half million trees on his

property throughout his life. Roosevelt worked with professional foresters from the College of


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Forestry at Syracuse University to plan his tree-planting efforts. After the chestnut blight moved up

the Hudson valley, FDR attempted experiments to reintroduce the chestnut with Asian varieties in

1937. As president, FDR‟s interest in forestry became an important part of the work of the Civilian

Conservation Corps (CCC) in the TVA project and the national park system.

Even while busy as president of the United States, he continued to support ecological surveys and

historical research in the Hudson valley. In a letter to historian and friend Helen Wilkinson Reynolds

in 1937, Roosevelt wrote of his support for the survey work of Vassar College professor Edith

Adelaide Roberts on the botanical resources of Dutchess County, and added some historical

landscape comments of his own: “I am glad Miss Roberts is doing the ecological survey. Does she

know the story about the two fields in front of our house? There are still three or four very old white

oaks …we figured that they dated to about the year 1650…They grew up as field trees because they

spread out from the bottom without hindrance from other trees.” As “wolf” trees, and with some

archaeological data, Roosevelt surmised that Indians had cultivated the fields. Like the Stone Church,

Springwood‟s oak trees can be considered both natural and cultural resources.

Dutchess County as a Regional Study in Natural Resources

During the 1940s, a composite perspective of the natural resources of Dutchess County was created

as a diorama of Stissing Mountain, located in Pine Plains, in the American Museum of Natural History

in New York City. The main exhibit is titled “An October Afternoon near Stissing Mountain,” one of

the four seasons displayed in the overall exhibit, along with specific displays of the local history,

geology, soil, plant and animal life above and below ground. The exhibits are located in the Felix M.

Warburg Memorial Hall of the museum; together they illustrate the ecology of plant and animal life

over forty square miles in the Pine Plains area. The exhibits were opened in 1951 under the

leadership of Henry K. Svenson, then chairman and curator of the museum‟s Department of Forestry

and General Botany, who conducted years of field research on the natural resources of the Pine Plains

area, and Harry L. Shapiro, head of the Department of Anthropology, a summer resident of the town.

They examine both the natural cycles and the human imprint on the land from the period of early

settlement in 1790, through the height of agricultural production through the Civil War period,

subsequent exhaustion of the land after 1870, and the restoration of fertility and improved land use

practices in the twentieth century.


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Staff from Cornell Cooperative Extension Dutchess County assisted property owners in restoring

their land, while natural scientists continued to study the natural resources of the area. These studies

led to the effort by the Nature Conservancy in 1959 to create the Stissing Mountain and Thompson

Pond nature preserve. Continued research by scientists including Madeleine Peirce from Vassar in

1973 and Eric Kiviat from Bard in 1990 and a report by the Town Conservation Advisory Committee

(CAC) in 2004 led to the declaration of “The Stissing Mountain Critical Environmental Area” by New

York State.

Cornell Cooperative Extension also promoted the preservation efforts by local land trusts including

the Dutchess Land Conservancy in eastern Dutchess County and the Winnakee Land Trust in

northern Dutchess County. For example, from 1985 to 2010 the Dutchess Land Conservancy

worked with 330 landowners to protect over 33,000 acres. National and regional organizations,

including the Nature Conservancy, Open Space Institute and Scenic Hudson, also worked to conserve

land in the area, while many county residents engaged in creative approaches. For example, Frances

and Willis Reese offered land along the Wappinger Creek to the town for a public park, Mary and

William Lunt spearheaded the purchase of Peach Hill in the town of Poughkeepsie, and former

orthopedic surgeon turned dairyman Samuel Simon organized a handful of family dairy farms into

Hudson Valley Fresh, saving over 5,000 acres of farmland. In the region, with the leadership of

Dutchess County resident Glenn Hoagland, Mohonk Preserve is the land steward of nearly 7,000

acres.

Regional Planning

Along with FDR, Dutchess County‟s most famous public intellectual, author Louis Mumford was a

proponent of open space planning. Mumford lived in Amenia and worked in New York City for the

Regional Plan Association (RPA). In the 1930s, Mumford advocated to set aside space in the fast-

growing New York Metropolitan region as parkland, such as linear parkways including the Taconic

Parkway in Dutchess County. Among other ideas promoted by Mumford and his colleague Benton

McKaye, would be the delineation of a trail along the ridges of the Appalachian Mountains from

Georgia to Maine. A segment of the Appalachian Trail runs through eastern Dutchess County, not

too far from Mumford‟s country home.


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Many Dutchess County residents have taken care of the trail over the years, and during a period of re-

routing in the 1970s, Vassar students in one of my land use seminars, assisted the Boston Regional

office of the National Park Service to design the booklet that mapped out the new route. Over the

next few years, other students in that seminar would delineate and map the Hyde Park Trail

connecting NPS and New York State historic properties and parks. In 1976, my seminar students

worked alongside Landscape Architecture students from Cornell University, to develop from the

former Children‟s Aid Society Summer Camp into a new county park, Bowdoin Park, with significant

views of the Hudson River. This effort involved many levels of cooperation, as students were

coordinated in the field by Bill Hogan of Cornell Cooperative Extension Dutchess County, assisted by

County Planner Eric Gillert, and received ecological and natural resource advice from Axel Horne,

Peter Dykeman and Gus Tillman of the Cary Arboretum (now the Cary Institute of Ecosystem

Studies in Millbrook).

Regional planning efforts by various organizations and agencies would become more expansive in the

second half of the 20th century. A number of different organizations would form, such as Mid-

Hudson Pattern for Progress, which, like the RPA, is primarily interested in economic development,

although environmental quality issues are also important as indicators of the quality of life. A major

issue that planning agencies, such as the Dutchess County Department of Planning and Development,

have studied and attempted to reverse, is that of “sprawl” and the loss of open space and farmland.

Sprawl had entered the lexicon of environmental planning and community development issues in

1965 when Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Robert C. Weaver spoke at the dedication

of the Dutchess County office building in downtown Poughkeepsie. He posited that the containment

of sprawl would be through “comprehensive area-wide planning,” that is, through both central city

renewal and by careful land use planning and zoning in the villages and countryside.

County Commissioner of Planning Henry Heissenbuttel and his deputy Kenneth Toole took up the

challenge. In their publication The Future of Dutchess County, published in 1972, they created a

conceptual land use framework that distinguished between city, village and countryside, to enhance

economic growth, while supporting social communities and conserving the county‟s significant natural

resources and landscapes. The guidelines were published by the Regional Plan Association, in

cooperation with the County and Mid-Hudson Pattern for Progress, and the next year became the

foundation for the RPA‟s and Pattern‟s own publication The Mid-Hudson: A Development Guide, in


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which open space and agricultural areas were a part of the overall planning to preserve regional

natural resources. These two sets of guidelines from 35 years ago have formed the basis for the

currently proposed Centers and Greenspaces Guide by the county planning department.

In the late 1960s under Toole‟s direction, the county had already begun a cultural resources survey to

update the 1966 Hudson River Valley Commission report Historic Sites and Buildings in the Hudson River

Valley. In the 1969 Landmarks of Dutchess County, 1683-1867, published in the Architecture Worth

Saving in New York series by the New York State Council on the Arts, over 300 structures were

researched and photographed and with consultation from Jeh V. Johnson, local and nationally

recognized architect and professor of architecture at Vassar. The volume was published in order to

guide “growth and development” and “encourage selective preservation of this inheritance.”

A decade later, the State got back into the act of inventorying the natural and cultural resources of the

Hudson River Valley. In the 1979 The Hudson River Valley Study, the DEC, under Commissioner

Robert Flacke and former Commissioner Peter Berle and his special assistant Peter Borrelli, directed a

report to the state legislature to enact legislation “with regard to the need to protect the scenic,

recreational and ecologically-important resources” of the mid-Hudson river valley. The cultural and

natural resource study coincided with the development of the Coastal Zone Management Program in

the same years. Both of these studies eventually led to state legislation to develop the Hudson River

Valley Greenway in 1990. Other later studies, inventories, and planning documents, such as DEC‟s

Conserving Open Space in New York State, 1998 and the Dutchess County Agricultural and Farmland Protection

Plan of the same year, would lead Congressman Maurice Hinchey, this year (2010), to request the

National Park Service to revisit the earlier studies promoted by Laurance Rockefeller after the demise

of the Hudson River Valley Commission in 1976 about a possible NPS heritage area.

Scenic Hudson led the effort to develop the Greenway, and included the public agencies of the New

York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and Office of Parks, Recreation and

Historic Preservation (OPRHP), NYS Council on the Arts, and the National Park Service. Most of

the promotional effort came from Dutchess County and included Franny Reese, “Godmother of the

Hudson River,” Dennis Murray, president of Marist College, Jay Rolison, state senator from the

county, and Richard Wager, publisher of the Poughkeepsie Journal, who, according to Scenic Hudson‟s

then-executive director Klara Sauer, personally persuaded Governor George Pataki to sign the

legislation in the final hour. Dutchess County was the first county to sign on to the Compact, and the


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Greenway across the Beacon-Newburgh Bridge along I-84 linking the two cities would be among the

first trails generated by the state program. As of 2010, the Greenway Compact has been adopted by

29 of the county‟s 30 municipalities.

In 2009, the Walkway Over the Hudson opened as the “longest pedestrian bridge in the world” with

overwhelming support from mid-Hudson citizens, linking the counties of Dutchess and Ulster.

Hiking and biking trails from the Harlem Valley in eastern Dutchess County to New Paltz and west

will soon connect twenty to thirty miles of trails, fulfilling Mumford‟s vision from his home in

Amenia. The last five years of the effort to secure the former Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge was led

by Dutchess County resident and avid biker Fred Schaeffer who garnered funding from the Dyson

Foundation in Millbrook, Scenic Hudson, and state and federal grants. Over 700,000 walkers,

bicyclists, and strollers have used the Walkway in its first year, allowing views of the natural and

cultural resources of the Mid-Hudson valley, including Scenic Hudson‟s Frances Reese Park on the

west shore south of the Walkway and the Mid-Hudson Bridge.

Three decades earlier, in northern Dutchess County, the Hudson River Shorelands Task Force was

formed by the non-profit historic preservation organization Hudson River Heritage, who, with active

volunteers, developed a survey of major river estate properties, from the Roosevelt and Vanderbilt

NPS historic sites to Wilderstein and Montgomery Place estates in the Towns of Hyde Park,

Rhinebeck, Red Hook and Tivoli. The completion of the initial survey led to many more estate

properties being placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and declaration of the entire 16-

mile District as the “longest historic district in the nation.” As Executive Director of the Shorelands

Task Force in 1979-80, I worked to get all the affected municipalities to sign on to a compact to

recognize the historic district as they planned for development. We were eventually successful, and it

would become a model for the Greenway Compact about a decade later.

The first New York State Scenic Roads guidelines were developed for the estates district, which, over

the years expanded from its original 16 miles in Dutchess County northward into Columbia County to

include the historic Livingston lands and historic site of Clermont and the state historic site of Olana.

New York State has recognized the “Estates District Scenic Area” as an Area of Statewide

Significance for use in regional and local planning.


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In addition, the initial success encouraged Hudson River Heritage to develop Cultural Resource

Inventories (CRIs) for each of the towns to be incorporated into their master plans and zoning maps.

This effort was coordinated with the development of Natural Resource Inventories (NRI‟s) through

assistance of Cornell Cooperative Extension Dutchess County and the exhaustive and impeccable

scientific research of Eric Kiviat at Hudsonia, the environmental research institute located at Bard

College. Eric‟s research and publications on the wetlands, plants, animals (especially the Blanding‟s

turtle), and human ecology of Dutchess County, and indeed the entire mid-Hudson bioregion, has

been instrumental in writing a set of Biodiversity Guidelines in 2001 for the Dutchess County

Environmental Management Council (EMC) and local CACs to develop NRIs for the county‟s

planning efforts, town and village master plans, and the Hudson River Estuary Program‟s “Significant

Biodiversity Areas.”

Environmental Planning

The use of environmental research through NRIs and special scientific-based reports by consultants

or non-profit environmental organizations evolved through legislation and public policies during the

1960s and 70s. In 1962, Rachel Carson‟s Silent Spring had brought the dangers of pesticides to the

forefront of national consciousness, while various landscape conservation and wilderness preservation

battles that led to the enactment of the Wilderness Act in 1964 continued to make the national news.

Aldo Leopold‟s A Sand County Almanac was published in 1966. In that same period, Consolidated

Edison (Con Ed) proposed a hydroelectric power plant on Storm King Mountain in the Hudson

Highlands. Conservationists throughout the Hudson Valley were outraged at the potential

desecration of the mountain, and a small group organized themselves into the Scenic Hudson

Preservation Conference, later simply Scenic Hudson, fought to stave off the project. After many

scientific reports were filed about the potential harm to the river and its ecology and to the mountain

itself, the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1965 ruled against Con Ed and the Federal Power Commission.

The judgment had national implications, as it became the basis for federal environmental policy. For

example, the government passed the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969 (NEPA), signed

January 1, 1970, and further policy acts would emerge over the next few years to protect air, water,

and endangered species. NEPA also created procedures to study potential impacts of a proposal on

an area‟s aesthetics, ecology, and social services; these were to be considered as important as

economic issues. And, most important for Scenic Hudson and other environmental non-


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governmental organizations (NGO‟s), the right to question development proposals was broadened

beyond appurtenant landowners to other concerned citizens.

Potential aesthetic impacts became important in 1979 during hearings before the U. S. Nuclear

Regulatory Commission and the Power Authority of the State of New York for a proposed nuclear

power plant in Greene County, within viewsheds of Dutchess and Columbia counties. The successful

defeat of the proposed three-and-a-half-billion dollar power plant led to the development of Visual

Impact Analysis by New York State as a component of its review process. Further refinement of

aesthetic and visual impact analysis of local historical cultural landscapes would lead to the analysis of

“community character,” which, along with computerized viewshed analysis and projected economic

impacts became the significant arguments to defeat the proposed St. Lawrence Cement plant across

the Dutchess County border near Hudson in Columbia county. The viewshed analysis prepared for

the Town of Amenia and presented at this conference, is based, in part, on work done in 1986 by

Stephanie Mauri of the Dutchess County Historical Society and is a fine example of combining both

cultural and natural resource analysis. Developed over the past few years as part of the town‟s NRI,

and presented at today‟s conference, it is a major step towards defining the town‟s community

character and will be an essential tool in the town‟s development of a master plan as a “Scenic

Protection Overlay District” that harmonizes both natural and cultural resources.

After the passage of NEPA, New York State, like most all other states, soon developed its own “little

NEPA.” The explosion in the use of SEQR (State Environmental Quality Review Act) in the 1980s

and 1990s necessitated an equally important need for natural resource data. To fulfill this need for

local and regional planning, the EMC and affiliated CAC‟s, with assistance in GIS mapping and public

outreach by Cornell Cooperative Extension, compiled the first countywide NRI in 1985 and expanded

it in 2010 for today‟s presentation.

During the past three-decades, the DEC compiled, mapped and assessed natural resource data and

identified certain specific areas for protection. These areas might contain flora or fauna on the state‟s

rare or endangered species list or composite micro-ecosystems where potential disturbance could

seriously damage fragile energy pathways. In Dutchess County, the DEC has registered 31 “Critical

Environmental Areas” as of 2010.


17

Meanwhile, the loss of biodiversity due to increasing development, specifically sprawl, necessitated

updating of former town master plans. Researchers associated with both public and private agencies,

especially Dutchess County Planning and Cornell Cooperative Extension, NGOs, colleges, and citizen

groups, especially CACs through the EMC, worked to update the local and county NRI. They

engaged in specific studies of natural landscape features that included a focus on the ecology,

pollution, and cultural histories of the county‟s waterways, such as Wappinger Creek, the Casperkill,

and the Fall Kill. For example, Vassar geologists Jeffrey Walker and Kirsten Menking have led a team

that has completed a comprehensive study of the Casperkill, while Marist biologist Thomas Lynch

and his students have studied the Fall Kill‟s stream ecology, hands-on efforts by local members of

Clearwater and the Hyde Park CAC have worked on the stream‟s natural wildlife corridor, and Vassar

students mapped a greenway trail along the creek to include historic and cultural properties from the

mouth at the Hudson northeast upstream to the National Park Service site at Eleanor Roosevelt‟s Val-

Kill. The county‟s forested landscape is also being studied by biologist Margaret Ronsheim and

geographer Mary Ann Cunningham using Edith Roberts‟ work and map of the 1930s, along with the

aerial survey of the county of that period and comparing it to recent aerial photographs, using GIS

methodology, as well as research in the field locating specific plants and landscape features with GPS

technology.

Conclusion

Since, according to geographer David Lowenthal, we are all “unavoidably implicated in environmental

change, we must try to manage it despite knowing we will always make mistakes.” To assist in our

efforts at managing our environment through better land use decisions, years of research by local

citizens and scientists have resulted in useable natural and cultural resource inventories. Research

specifically designed for local Natural Resource Inventories emerged during the late 1970s and early

1980s, and continues, as we have seen and heard this morning, up to today. Staff from the Dutchess

County EMC and Cornell Cooperative Extension collated the data and maps collected by individuals

and citizen groups in 1985. The new NRI that we have heard about today is a much anticipated and

updated product, with extensive maps produced by 21st century GIS technology and the broad

cooperation of natural scientists and conservationists from throughout the region. They follow in the

footsteps of many who have worked in these vineyards before them. They have, as Aldo Leopold

would have hoped, related to their environment as “something we can see, feel, understand, love, or


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otherwise have faith in.” Dutchess County‟s landscape, especially its role in creating a quality of life

for its ecological and human inhabitants, will be indebted to their efforts. Thank you.

Notes*

I wish to acknowledge and thank the organizers of the Conference on Dutchess County‟s Natural

Resource Inventory (NRI), held on November 6, 2010, for the honor of giving the keynote address,

especially Jeffrey Walker (Vassar College), Allison Chatrchyan and Emily Vail (both of Cornell

Cooperative Extension Dutchess County), and Lalita Malik (Dutchess County Environmental

Management Council). This essay is an extended version of my talk and retains much of its informal

style with references to colleagues in the audience who have been involved in the scientific efforts to

develop the 2010 NRI that was presented at the conference. I also accepted Jeff‟s invitation to tell a

few personal stories of my work in the region.

The following notes constitute a bibliographic essay in lieu of more formal footnotes for the reader to

follow up on themes and information presented in this introductory sketch on Dutchess County‟s

history of environmental planning, with its focus on the development of natural and cultural resource

inventories. Although the conference focused specifically on natural resource inventories, this essay

suggests that the development of a conservation ethic, and hence a need to create NRIs for town and

regional planning decisions, developed through an integration of a humanistic as well as natural

scientific examination of the landscape.

Annotated Bibliography

Quotations from Aldo Leopold are from A Sand County Almanac, first published in 1949 (NY: Oxford

University Press, 1966). D. W. Meinig‟s landscape categories are found in his essay “The Beholding

Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene,” in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays,

edited by D. W. Meinig (NY: Oxford University Press, 1979). I have previously used Meinig‟s

terminology to examine the historical construction of the Mohonk Mountain House landscape in

“The Parlor in the Wilderness: Domesticating an Iconic American Landscape,” The Geographical Review,

vol. 99, no. 3 (July 2009).

Examples of early natural history narratives, including observation of deforestation‟s effect of soil by

Crevecoeur in 1782, the geologist Sir Charles Lyell of the Palisades in 1841, and geologist W.W.


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Mather in his Natural History of New York State in 1845 can be found in Harvey K. Flad, “The Hudson

River Valley and the Geographical Imagination,” From the Hudson to the Hamptons: Snapshots of the New

York Metropolitan Area, edited by Ines M. Miyares, Marianna Pavlovskaya and Gregory A. Pope

(Washington, D.C.: Association of American Geographers, 2001); reprinted in Watershed Journal: The

Hudson Valley Art Project, edited by Miwon Kwon (NY: Minetta Brook, 2002). A brief history of

natural history collecting is found in Sue Ann Prince, ed., Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge:

Natural History in North America, 1730-1860 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003). For

a local study see Margaret R. Wright, Nineteenth Century Natural History at Vassar College: Darwinian

Theory in the Classroom? (Poughkeepsie: Vassar College, 1988); and Rick Jones, The Evolution of the

Natural Sciences: Selections from the Natural History Museum at Vassar College (Poughkeepsie: Warthin

Museum of Geology and Natural History, Vassar College, 2008). For a biography of George Perkins

Marsh see David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Seattle: University of

Washington Press, 2000). For more information about the Natural History Museum, see the link to

the Vassar College Encyclopedia in the Earth Science and Geography Department entry in

“Histories” at http://150.vassar.edu. For a biography of Daniel Smiley see Larry E. Burgess, Daniel

Smiley of Mohonk: A Naturalist’s Life (Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press).

Thomas Cole‟s paintings and his 1836 “Essay on American Scenery” can be found in the many

volumes devoted to the art of the Hudson River School. I have quoted his remarks elsewhere in my

catalog essay “Following „the pleasant paths of Taste‟: The Traveler‟s Eye and New World

Landscapes,” in Humanizing Landscapes: Geography, Culture and the Magoon Collection (Poughkeepsie, NY:

Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, 2000), which also contains an excellent

reproduction of Asher B. Durand‟s painting “Where the Streamlet Sings in Rural Joy,” (ca. 1850), part

of Vassar College‟s Magoon Collection. David Schuyler also notes Cole‟s concerns about the

despoliation of the local environment in his catalog essay “The Mid-Hudson as Iconic Landscape:

Tourism, Economic Development, and the Beginnings of a Preservationist Impulse,” in Within the

Landscape: Essays in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture, edited by Phillip Earenfight and Nancy

Siegel (Carlisle, PA: The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, 2005). An 1841 reprinting of Cole‟s

“Essay on American Scenery” can be found in Bonnie Maranca, A Hudson Valley Reader (Woodstock,

NY: The Overlook Press, 1991). For reproductions of Durand‟s “Kindred Spirits” (1848) and

“Dover Plains, Dutchess County, New York” (1848), see Linda Ferber, ed. Kindred Spirits: Asher B.

Durand and the American Landscape (NY: Brooklyn Museum, 2007).

http://150.vassar.edu/


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The history of Andrew Jackson Downing‟s landscape design at Matthew Vassar‟s estate “Springside”

is documented in Harvey K. Flad, “Matthew Vassar‟s Springside: „…the hand of Art, when guided by

Taste,‟” in Prophet with Honor: The Career of Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815-1852, edited by George B.

Tatum and Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape

Architecture XI (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Trustees for Harvard University, 1989).

Downing‟s efforts in other Dutchess County estates is discussed in Judith K. Major, To Live in the New

World: A. J. Downing and American Landscape Gardening (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of

Technology, 1997). For a biography of Downing see David Schuyler, Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson

Downing 1815-1852 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

A discussion of the geological research conducted by Vassar College‟s professors of natural history

and geology is sketched in Harvey K. Flad,. “Earth Science and Geography Department History” on

Vassar College‟s website devoted to the college‟s sesquicentennial in 2011 at

http://150.vassar.edu/histories/history-of-earth-science-and-geography-at-vassar-college/index.html.

Volumes of the reports for the Hudson River Valley Commission will be found in most regional

research libraries (Vassar, Marist, or Adriance in Poughkeepsie). The Role of Plant Life in the History of

Dutchess County by Edith Adelaide Roberts and Helen Wilkinson Reynolds (Poughkeepsie, NY:

authors, 1938) is housed in Special Collections, Vassar College.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt as conservationist is examined in essays in Henry L. Henderson and David

B. Woolner, eds., FDR and the Environment (NY: 2005). Comments on FDR‟s influence on the

landscape of Dutchess County and excerpts from his letter about his oak trees are found in Harvey K.

Flad and Clyde Griffen, Main Street to Mainframes: Landscape and Social Change in Poughkeepsie (Albany:

State University of New York Press, 2009).

Photographs of the Stissing Mountain display and of aspects of Pine Plains and Dutchess County

ecological history are displayed on the American Museum of Natural History in New York‟s website

(http://www.amnh.org/).

Copies of the regional and county planning reports can be found in the library of the Dutchess

County Planning Department and at most local libraries, while the Landmarks study of historic

http://150.vassar.edu/histories/history-of-earth-science-and-geography-at-vassar-college/index.html

http://www.amnh.org/


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architecture is also in the Dutchess County Historical Society library. Poughkeepsie resident Ralph

Arlyck‟s national award-winning film “Hyde Park” offers a unique perspective on small town land use

issues and the personalities involved in local planning. Robert C. Weaver‟s quote on “comprehensive

area-wide planning” and Klara Sauer‟s recollection on the origins of the Greenway are reported in

Flad and Griffen‟s Main Street to Mainframes (op.cit.). The role of Hudson River Heritage in developing

cultural resource inventories of the Estates District is noted in Robbe Stimson and Harvey K. Flad,

“Preservation of an Historic Rural Landscape: Roles for Public and Private Sectors,” in Farmsteads &

Market Towns: A Handbook for Preserving the Cultural Landscape (Albany: Preservation League of New

York State, 1982). The Hudson River Shorelands Task Force in 1979-80 worked to get all affected

municipalities to sign on to a compact to recognize the historic district as they planned for

development through new zoning and master plans. This was rather difficult, for, as some in the

audience at the conference who have been around for a while may recall, the very idea of regional

planning was considered a “socialist plot” for many towns and villages in the late 70‟s and early 80‟s.

However, the Task Force, working with some of the local citizen-members on their town planning

boards, planners from Dutchess County Planning Department and community development

specialists from Cornell Cooperative Extension, was eventually successful, and the joining of the

northern Dutchess communities together into a “compact” would become a model for the Greenway

Compact a decade later. As Stuart Findlay from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies remarked at

the conference, “Local Control requires Local Responsibility.”

The Storm King story and its role in federal legislation to enact the National Environmental Policy

Act is told in Alan R. Talbot, Power Along the Hudson: The Storm King Case and the Birth of Environmentalism

(NY: E. P. Dutton, 1972) and Frances F. Dunwell, The Hudson: America’s River (NY: Columbia

University Press, 2008). Commentary on the significance of early use of visual impact analysis and

aesthetic impact, such as Flad‟s “Prepared Testimony on Aesthetic Impact of Greene County Nuclear

Power Plant” in 1979, and further development of community character analysis, can be found in

Katie Ghilain, “Improving Community Character Analysis in the SEQRA Environmental Impact

Review Process: A Cultural Landscape Approach to Defining the Elusive „Community Character,‟” in

N.Y.U. Environmental Law Journal 17 (2009); also Harvey K. Flad, “The Influence of the Hudson River

School of Art in the Preservation of the River, its Natural and Cultural Landscape, and the Evolution

of Environmental Law,” in Robert Henshaw, ed., Environmental History of the Hudson River: Ecology that


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Changed Human Uses, Human Uses that Changed Ecology (Albany: State University of New York Press,

forthcoming 2011).

David Lowenthal‟s remarks to accept our limits in managing the environment come from his essay

“Environmental History: From the Conquest to the Rescue of Nature,” in Alexander B. Murphy and

Douglas L. Johnson, eds., Cultural Encounters with the Environment (NY: Rowen and Littlefield, 2000).

Aldo Leopold‟s quotation is from A Sand County Almanac (op.cit.).

Documents

The Natural Resources of Dutchess County in the Past ... Program in Environmental Studies ... elected to the National Academy of Arts and ... The Natural Resources of Dutchess County